The World of Yesterday

by Stefan Zweig

  I said goodbye to him in the city, outside the Ministry, never guessing that it was for the last time. Later, I saw from press photographs that the street down which we had been driving together was the one where, shortly afterwards, his assassins lay in wait for the same car. It was pure chance that I had not witnessed that historically fateful scene myself, a fact that left me more deeply impressed and emotionally aware than ever of the tragic episode with which the misfortune of Germany and indeed of all Europe began.

  I was already in Westerland that day, where hundreds upon hundreds of visitors to the spa resort were on the beach, happily bathing. Once again a band was playing, like the band in Baden on the day when news came of Franz Ferdinand’s assassination. The musicians was entertaining a carefree audience enjoying their summer holiday when newspaper vendors came running along the promenade like a flock of stormy petrels, shouting,: “Walther Rathenau assassinated!” Panic broke out, shaking the entire Reich.5 The mark dropped sharply, and there was no stopping it until it fell to fantastic, crazy numbers running into billions. Only now did a real witches’ sabbath of inflation begin, and by comparison our Austrian figures of fifteen thousand crowns falling to the value of one looked like a mere children’s game. I would need a whole book to describe it in all its incredible detail, and that book would sound like a fairy tale to modern readers. There were days when I had to pay fifty thousand marks for a newspaper in the morning and a hundred thousand in the evening; anyone who had to exchange foreign currency did it piecemeal, by the hour, because at four o’clock he would get many more marks than at three, and at five o’clock many more again than sixty minutes earlier. I sent my publisher a manuscript that I had been working on for a year, and I thought I could safely request an immediate advance payment for what ten thousand copies of the book would earn me. Once the sum was transferred to my account, it hardly covered the postage for the parcel a week before. You paid your tram fare in millions of marks, trucks carted paper money from the central Reichsbank to the commercial banks, and two weeks later you could find banknotes to the value of a hundred thousand marks lying in the gutter, contemptuously tossed aside by a beggar. A shoelace cost more than a shoe in the past, more than a luxury shop with a stock of two thousand pairs of shoes; repairing a broken window was more expensive than building the whole house had once been, while a book cost more than a printing works with hundred of presses before inflation. You could buy whole rows of six-storey buildings on the Kurfürstendamm for a hundred dollars. Convert the sums of money, and factories cost the same as a wheelbarrow in the past. Teenage boys who had found a crate of bars of soap forgotten on the docks drove around in cars and lived like princes for months on end by selling one bar of soap a day, while their parents, who had once been rich, were now reduced to beggary. Deliverymen founded banking houses and speculated in all kinds of foreign currency. Above them all rose the towering figure of the plutocrat Stinnes6 as he made money on the grand scale. Extending his credit by exploiting the fall in the value of the mark, he bought everything there was to be bought, coal mines and ships, factories, blocks of stocks and shares, castles and country estates, in effect paying nothing for them, because no agreement amounted to anything, nor did any debt. Soon a quarter of Germany was in his hands, and strangely enough the Germans, always intoxicated by visible success, hailed him as a genius. Meanwhile, the unemployed stood around in their thousands, shaking their fists at the black-marketeers and foreigners in their flashy cars who would buy up a whole street like a box of matches. Even the barely literate were dealing and speculating now, earning money with the secret feeling that they were all deceiving themselves and being deceived by some hidden hand, cleverly staging a scene of chaos in order to free the state from its debts and obligations. I think I have a fairly good knowledge of history, and never, so far as I know, has madness of such gigantic dimensions been seen. All values were changed, and not just material values; state decrees were laughed out of court, manners and morals were thrown overboard, Berlin was the worst sink of iniquity in the world. Bars, amusement arcades and shady dives sprang up like mushrooms. What we had seen in Austria was only a mild and gentle prelude to this witches’ sabbath, for the Germans now turned their methodical methods to the cause of perversions. Youths in wasp-waisted coats, their faces made up, promenaded along the Kurfürstendamm, and not all of them were professional rent boys; every grammar-school student wanted to earn something, and state secretaries and prominent financiers could be seen sitting in darkened bars shamelessly courting the favour of drunken sailors. Even the Rome of Suetonius never knew such orgies as those at the transvestites’ balls in Berlin, where hundreds of men in women’s clothing and women dressed like men danced under the benevolent gaze of the police. Amidst the headlong fall of all values, a kind of madness took hold of the bourgeois circles that had so far resisted any change to their well-ordered society. Young girls boasted proudly of perversities; to be suspected of still being a virgin at the age of sixteen would have been thought a disgrace in any Berlin school. Every girl wanted to be able to boast of her adventures, and the more exotic they were the better. But the outstanding feature of this pathetic eroticism was that it was all pretence. At heart, the orgiastic mood that broke out in Germany with inflation was merely feverish imitation; you could tell that these girls from good middle-class families would rather have been wearing their hair neatly parted than slicked back into a masculine style, and would have been happier eating apple cake with whipped cream than drinking spirits. It was impossible not to notice that the whole country was unhappy with this overheated atmosphere, this daily torture on the rack of inflation, nerves stretched to breaking point, or that all the entire war-weary nation really wanted was peace and quiet, good order and a little security. And secretly it hated the new German Republic, not because the government might suppress some of this wild freedom but, on the contrary, because it held the reins too loosely.

  Anyone who lived through those apocalyptic months and years, repelled and embittered, also felt that there must be some reaction, a terrible backlash. And there, waiting in the wings with a smile, stopwatches in their hands, were the very people responsible for bringing Germany to this plight. “The worse things are in the country, the better for us!” was their motto. They knew that their hour would come. Counter-revolutionaries were already openly gathering around Ludendorff—not Hitler yet; he had little power at the time. The officers whose epaulettes had been torn off organised themselves into secret societies, members of the lower middle class, seeing themselves cheated of their savings, quietly closed ranks and placed themselves in advance at the disposal of any regime ready to promise law and order. Nothing was so disastrous for the German Republic as its idealistic attempt to leave the people and even its enemies their liberty. The orderly German nation did not know what to do with its liberty, and was already looking impatiently for someone to take it away again.

  The day in 1923 that marked the end of German inflation could have been a turning-point in history. When the bell tolled for every crazy, dizzying million marks, now to be redeemed by a single new mark, a norm had been set. And indeed, the murky tide soon ebbed, taking all its dirt and debris with it. The bars and dives disappeared, conditions reverted to normality. Now everyone could calculate what he had won and what he had lost. Most people, the great majority, were losers. But the men who were to blame for the war were not held responsible; instead, feeling turned against those who, in a spirit of self-sacrifice, had taken on the thankless burden of reconstruction. Nothing, as we have to keep reminding ourselves, made the German people so bitter, so mad with hatred, so ripe for Hitler as the inflation. For the war, murderous as it had turned out, had provided hours of jubilation at the start, with the ringing of bells and victorious fanfares. And as an incurably militaristic nation, Germany considered that its pride had been bolstered by the occasional victory in the war, while it felt only soiled, deceived and humiliated by inflation. A whole generation never forgot or fo
rgave the German Republic for those years, preferring to summon their own murderers again. But that was still in the distant future. To all outward appearance, the whole wild phantasmagoria seemed to be over like a dance of will-o’-the-wisps. Day had dawned again, you could see the way ahead. And already we saw and welcomed the return of order as the beginning of a lasting period of peace and quiet. Hopeless fools that we had always been, we thought yet again that war was defeated. However, that fatal delusion at least gave us a decade of work, of hope, even of security.

  Seen from today’s viewpoint, in spite of everything, those years from 1924 to 1933—in fact just short of a decade—from the end of German inflation to the moment when Hitler came to power, represent a pause in the succession of catastrophes that our generation had witnessed and suffered since 1914. Not that there was any shortage of individual instances of tension, agitation and crisis—more particularly the economic crisis of 1929—but within that decade peace seemed to prevail in Europe, and that in itself meant a great deal. Germany had been received into the League of Nations on honourable terms, and loans had encouraged its economic reconstruction, although in point of fact that really meant secret rearmament. Britain had disarmed. In Italy, Mussolini had undertaken to protect Austria. The world seemed to want to rebuild itself. Paris, Vienna, Berlin, New York, Rome—the victorious and the defeated cities alike were more attractive than ever; aeroplanes speeded up travel, passport restrictions were relaxed. Fluctuation between currencies was over; you knew how much you had coming in and how much you could spend. Your attention was no longer so anxiously fixed on outside problems. You could work again, collect your thoughts, think of intellectual matters. You could even dream again and hope for a united Europe. For those ten years—for a brief moment in the history of the world—it seemed as if our sorely tried generation could live a normal life once more.

  The most notable event in my personal life during those years was the arrival in my house of a guest who settled benevolently in, a guest I had never expected—success. Understandably, I feel uncomfortable about mentioning the success my books enjoyed in the outside world, and in a normal situation I would have left out even a fleeting mention that might be interpreted as self-satisfaction or boastfulness. But I have a particular right, even a duty, not to hush up this part of the story of my life, for that success has become a thing of the past in the last seven years, since the advent of Hitler. Not one of the hundreds of thousands, even millions of copies of my works, books that had secured their place in bookshops and countless private houses, can be bought in Germany today. Anyone who still has a copy of one of them keeps it carefully concealed. They are consigned to the ‘poison cupboard’ of public libraries, kept there for the few who want to study them, by special permission of the authorities, for research purposes, meaning mainly for the purpose of denunciation. It is a long time since the readers and friends who write to me have dared to put my reprehensible name on an envelope. And as if that were not enough, in France, Italy, and all the countries now reduced to servitude, where my books used to be widely read in translation, they are also banned today by Hitler’s orders. I am now a writer who, as Grillparzer7 said, “walks behind his corpse in his own lifetime”. Everything, or almost everything, that I built up over forty years in the international arena has been smashed by that one fist. So in mentioning my own ‘success’ I am not speaking of something that is really mine, but something that once was mine, like my house, my native land, my self-confidence, my freedom, my lack of inhibition. I cannot illustrate the depths to which I and countless other innocent people sank later in all their depth and their full extent without mentioning, first, the height from which we fell, or the unique consequences of this elimination of our entire literary generation. I really cannot think of any similar example in history.

  Success did not arrive suddenly, storming into my house; it came slowly and discreetly, but it proved a faithful friend, and stayed with me until Hitler drove it away with the lash of his decrees. It grew year by year. The very first work I published after Jeremiah, the first volume in my Master Builders series, a study of three writers,8 paved the way for me. The Expressionists, the activists and other experimental writers had had their day, and other writers who had waited patiently had access to readers again. My novellas Amok and Letter from an Unknown Woman enjoyed the popularity usually reserved for novels, and were dramatised, read in public and filmed. A small book of historical miniatures, Sternstunden der Menschheit9—read in every school, and published in the Insel-Bücherei series—sold 250,000 copies in a very short time. Within a few years I had acquired what, to my mind, is the most valuable kind of success a writer can have—a faithful following, a reliable group of readers who looked forward to every new book and bought it, who trusted me, and whose trust I must not disappoint. My success grew slowly greater, until every time I published a book twenty thousand copies were sold in Germany in the first few days after it came out, even before any advertisement had appeared in the papers. Sometimes I deliberately tried to keep out of the way of my own success, but it followed me around with remarkable persistence. For instance, I had written a book for my own personal pleasure, my biography of Fouché, and when I sent it to my publisher he wrote to say he was going to print ten thousand copies immediately. I urged him, by return of post, not to print so many of this particular title. Fouché was not an attractive character, the book contained not a hint of any love interest, and was never going to appeal to a wide circle of readers. I said I thought he had better print just five thousand for a start. After a year fifty thousand copies had been sold in Germany alone—the same Germany where no one is allowed to read a line of my work today. My almost pathological self-distrust made me doubtful of my version of Ben Jonson’s Volpone. I intended to produce a verse adaptation, and in nine days I sketched out the course of the action quickly and freely in prose. It so happened that the Dresden Court Theatre, to which I felt a moral obligation because it had staged the premiere of my first play Thersites, had just been asking whether I had any plans to write another drama, and I sent them the prose version, saying apologetically that it was only a sketch for my planned adaptation in verse. However, the theatre telegraphed back at once, telling me for Heaven’s sake not to change anything. And sure enough, the play was produced all over the world in that form (in New York by the Theatre Guild, with Alfred Lunt starring). Whatever I did in those years, my success and an ever-growing number of German readers remained faithful to me.

  When I was writing biographies or essays, I always felt an urge to explore the motives, or lack of motives, that made my subjects act as they did in the context of their own time. So sometimes, when I was in a thoughtful mood, I could not help wondering what exactly it was that made my books so unexpectedly popular. In the last resort, I think it arose from a personal flaw in me—I am an impatient, temperamental reader. Anything long-winded, high-flown or gushing irritates me, so does everything that is vague and indistinct, in fact anything that unnecessarily holds the reader up, whether in a novel, a biography or an intellectual argument. A book really satisfies me only if it maintains its pace page after page, carrying readers breathlessly along to the end. Nine-tenths of the books that come my way seem to be padded out with unnecessary descriptions, too much loquacious dialogue and superfluous minor characters; they are just not dynamic and exciting enough. I get impatient with many arid, slow-moving passages even in the most famous classic masterpieces, and I have often suggested a bold idea of mine to publishers—why not bring out a series of the great works of international literature, from Homer through Balzac and Dostoevsky to Mann’s The Magic Mountain, with the unnecessary parts cut? Then all those undoubtedly immortal works would gain a new lease of life in our own time.

  This dislike of mine for anything tediously long-winded must have transferred itself from my reading of other authors’ works to the writing of my own, making me train myself to be especially alert for such passages. I naturally write easily and f
luently, and in the first draft of a book I let my pen run on as it pleases, setting down anything that comes into my head. Similarly, when I am writing a biography I study all the factual material available. For my biography of Marie-Antoinette, for instance, I looked at all the details of her financial accounts to find out what her personal expenses were, I studied all the contemporary newspapers and pamphlets, I ploughed my way through the case files of her trial to the very last line. But none of that will be found in the final printed version, because I have hardly finished writing the first rough draft of a book before I begin on what to me is the real work, condensing my material and finding the right way to put it. I go on working tirelessly like this from draft to draft. I am constantly throwing ballast overboard, intensifying and clarifying a book’s inner architecture. Most writers cannot bring themselves to leave anything out, and having fallen rather in love with their subject hope to display a greater breadth and depth of knowledge than they really possess in every well-turned line, whereas my own ambition is always to know more than shows on the outside.